Reiterating the Problem with Flemish Revolution through a Comparison (and Proposed Compromise/Solution)

I’d be careful viewing it as “deleting your villagers and building new units”. I tried to use this analogy but inevitably I ran into the problem that if you view Flemish revolution as deleting and making new units you’d have to view military upgrades as deleting the old units and making new ones. Since this is kind of silly I found that this line of reasoning didn’t really pan out.

So the argument has to rest on what is the difference between upgrading villagers into military units and upgrading military units into even stronger military units of the same unit line? I made a longer post here in the Co-op/balane changes thread but the gist is:

  • Villagers cost much less than flemish militia which means you’re effectively loaning players resources depending on the number of villagers upgraded in it’s current implementation. The “cost” of the loan is really only losing the number of villagers which optimally balances current military strength with future military strength. E.g. if 50 vils 150 military were optimal the cost of the loan would only be the 50 villagers in lost production. That is you can think of it as getting a discount in exchange for losing (50 vills worth) future income, which is exactly what a loan is. You don’t care about villagers in excess of 50 because you would have converted them anyway (in this hypothetical where 50 is optimal).
  • These type of dynamics can be balanced only if other players can obtain similar free or loaned resources (e.g. AoE3 home cards, AoM god powers). Since AoE2 doesn’t have this its not going to be balanced.

Anyway your solution has a similar problem. It lets players skip straight to the optimal number of villagers meaning the downside is mostly eliminated. So it’s no longer a loan it’s just a free discount if it’s less than 10f, 25g per villager to upgrade. So you’d have to charge the full marginal cost + the fixed cost of the upgrade to make it match the behavior of any other military upgrade in the game.

Even after all of this there is still the issue of flexibility having value. Think of converting any unit in the game to another unit line and whether the marginal cost would be appropriate. I’m pretty sure you’ll find it’s too low a cost for the flexibility.